


unsuspected turns in the path

by noun



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Desk Sex, F/M, Oral Sex, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-30
Updated: 2020-07-30
Packaged: 2021-03-05 22:49:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,012
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25603096
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/noun/pseuds/noun
Summary: She sees him in a crowd while she is giving a speech, perhaps a year after her Mark disappears. It is a hallucination at worst, paranoia at best. That he had found her wanting enough to remove her Mark is one thing (and at least he had not done it as her aunt had done it to her father) but she finds she does not have time to play games when there is Dunwall to rebuild (again) and Morley to pacify and the corpse of the Abbey to bury, and so on.So she dismisses it.
Relationships: Emily Kaldwin/The Outsider
Comments: 2
Kudos: 38
Collections: Rare Pairs Exchange 2020





	unsuspected turns in the path

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Artabria](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Artabria/gifts).



> Title from Rainer Maria Rilke's 'You who never arrived'
> 
> All the immense  
> images in me—the far-off, deeply-felt landscape,  
> cities, towers, and bridges, and un-  
> suspected turns in the path,  
> and those powerful lands that were once  
> pulsing with the life of the gods—  
> all rise within me to mean  
> you, who forever elude me.

She sees him in a crowd while she is giving a speech, perhaps a year after her Mark disappears. It is a hallucination at worst, paranoia at best. That he had found her wanting enough to remove her Mark is one thing (and at least he had not done it as her aunt had done it to her father) but she finds she does not have time to play games when there is Dunwall to rebuild (again) and Morley to pacify and the corpse of the Abbey to bury, and so on.

So she dismisses it. How many men are there in the Isles with dark short-cropped hair, underfed and broad shouldered? She had held the gaze for only a moment, from far away, too far to reach him, and dismissed the chill in the moment as a ghost of memory only.

(And besides, the eyes weren’t right.)

She does not make a point of looking into what happened to any of the other Marked who might be able to provide some insight. Gradually, over the course of months and supplemented by gibbering Overseers and Oracles alike (the ones who survive, however briefly) she is able to surmise that something happened. That the world has shifted yet again.

Her brief stab of confusion at finding herself not embedded deep in these events and thus not provided with an insider’s knowledge is quickly supplanted by what she does have: the resources of an Empire. Eventually, Billie writes to her and explains a few of the things her Spymaster could not, and Emily applies imperial scissors once more to the knot of Morley while puzzling over the idea that the Outsider was _alive_ , in the traditional sense. 

Thereafter, there are other young men, though none of them are quite right. She makes a game of people-watching when she is not otherwise occupied in public, in the moments before a public engagement or out the window of her carriage. Corvo had taught her how to assess a number of faces for threats as rapidly as possible. She trusts her guards to do the heavy lifting of identifying who in a crowd might be carrying a knife, a bomb, and she can flit from face to face, seeking. 

Had it been him? Or had it only been a coincidence, now falsely bolstered by Billie’s outrageous claim? Emily believes her whole-heartedly. There was certainly enough supplemental evidence. If only Corvo wasn’t so far away. Corvo had a higher chance of finding him in Serkonos, where Billie had left him, but it was not something one could put in a letter, even with the Abbey gone. Now and then, as reports of various cults cross her desk, all quashed, she wishes for the unifying force of their zealotry. 

Time grinds on. The Empire moves on. People crave stability and normality, and work around the absence of religion as if the Abbey was never a pillar of society. She leaves the harmless cults alone, and none of them try any murder rituals. Taxes are paid, repairs continue, she tightens her fist around Parliament and continues to wean the Isles off whale oil. 

Some enterprising young fellow down at the Academy answers Karnaca’s wind power and Tyvia’s solar power with water power; some method of constructing a dam and using the water directed by it to generate electricity. There is to be a speech, a demonstration, commendations from the Empress herself. The event is not unusual; she has something similar in her obligations twice a month at least.

And Emily likes the Academy. Solkolov made an impression on her while she was still _impressionable_. The academics are infinitely more bearable than the nobility, there are interesting things to look at, and the conversations are stimulating. Not that she expects to have many. Upon arrival, she is escorted to a brief meeting with the Head, and, to her delight, Professor Dribner, newly risen in station. He walks alongside her when the posse moves to the largest lecture hall, chatting idly and not at all about the Void and disasters avoided. Emily is sat upon the stage with Dribner beside while the Head opens the demonstration, and then Emily rises to give her short speech. 

The trick is to look somewhere behind the crowd, and to never make eye contact with any one person. This presents the illusion to each person that you are looking at them, if not merely in their direction. She is given impressions of the mass of people only, though someone strikes her as too familiar. 

But there is no room to pause, to falter in her speech, to look again. She finishes, thanks the Academy and the inventor, and heads back to her seat to the inventor himself may lecture and begin the demonstration. Now, she is free to look out and seek what she _thought_ she saw, while all eyes are on the inventor with his model.

All sets of eyes but one, who look not at the main event, but at her.

There, in the crowd, among the students, third row from the front. While the speaker continues not on the invention in question but in droning thanks to the various patrons of the Academy, Emily looks at him and knows him in an instant. He holds her gaze, and does not flinch away. That is near confirmation.

Given the luxury to study him, she does. Bold, he tips his chin up. No, the eyes are not right, but the face is the same. His arms are folded, and he strikes the same pose, even though he is now held to solid ground. His hair is a bit longer, and he is wearing the Academy robes, though they are open to reveal the plain shirt and trousers underneath. Sokolov and Delilah’s portraits were accurate, but someone who had not seen him before the portraits with the extra touches the artists gave their work would fail to make the connection between the Outsider and this hazel-eyed young man, and further, would fail to persuade anyone else of it even if they grudgingly acknowledged some resemblance.

“Him,” she says to Professor Dribner, her designated escort, once the speeches are finished and she is expected to make introductions and pose for photos near the model dam. “Who is he?”

The old man hmms and squints, then nods decisively. “Ah, the Tyvian. Bright young man. Admitted about a year ago. Can’t for the life of me recall his name.”

“Introduce me,” Emily orders, and they wind their way to the crowd over to the wall where he waits. He watches them approach, and he does not flee.

Before Dribner can fumble an introduction, the young man bows in the old style, hand on his heart. “Your Imperial Majesty,” he says, and Emily _knows,_ every possible trace of doubt expunged. This is the Outsider — _was_ the Outsider, technically.

Now, it’s just a young man with a familiar face.

She holds out her hand. He takes it, and kisses it.

Dribner glances between them, and says nothing.

“And what do you study?” she asks him. She does not have to feign interest, even if her question is not what she really wants to ask.

His answer lurks in the margins of what he says aloud. 

“The movement of the heavens,” he says. “The course of all things.”

Now, Dribner does cut in. 

“Not quite,” Dribner says, to Emily, and to him, sternly, “Don’t be impertinent.” 

Back to Emily, he confides, “His admissions interview revolved around astral drift and navigation by ancient star charts. He’s done marvelous things with map fragments and what little Pandyssian writing we do have in the short time he’s been here. Now that the Abbey, is, ah, _indisposed_ , access to what records we have from before the Great Burning is somewhat easier to grant.” Dribner sighs. “Not as glamorous as what the fellows in Etiology and the Electromagnetism Council get up to, but mark my words, he’ll be published soon!”

“Congratulations,” Emily says sweetly, and he smiles.

“Fascinating stuff,” Dribner says. “Now, Empress, if you’ll allow me to—” but Emily cuts him off.

“Do you have examples of your work?” she asks.

“I do,” he replies. 

“I would like to see them.” He appears to consider the request.

Dribner starts to say something, but then the young man nods, once decisive and short jerk of his chin. It is so absolute that Dribner does not continue with his intended enforcement or censorship. 

“Of course,” he says. “Follow me.”

He turns, hands clasped behind him, walking down the corridor, and Emily addresses Drinber, who is half-horrified and morbidly curious both, his mouth a rictus, again speechless.

“I will return shortly,” she says, and to assuage any fears, she adds, “I will be safe.”

There is no Royal Protector yet. That she needs one more for lack of a Mark has not escaped her, but Corvo did well in training her, and there were guards aplenty around the Academy itself. There’s a knife sheathed in her boot, and the quiet part she cannot say aloud is that he is not going to hurt her; that she has known him for many years. Any comment Dribner might have made is neutered by Emily simply walking down the corridor herself, taking longer strides until the two of them are walking shoulder to shoulder.

He turns down a side hall, she follows. The door he opens is not even locked, but once she steps inside the room, she can guess why he didn’t need to bother. Hung from the ceiling are antique brass models of constellations, heavenly bodies. The leaded glass windows droop with age, only one is open and the breeze stirs the models above.

It has been years since this room has been used for teaching, all the desks pushed against the wall but for a few stragglers. On every surface, maps have been unrolled, compasses and other cartographer’s tools of all technological eras occasionally resting on curling corners to help keep them flat.

Emily goes to the lecturer’s desk, idly looking through the papers. The notes upon it are nearly incomprehensible. Billie had taught her rudimentary navigation by stars; this is magnatudes beyond those basic lessons.

“Billie told me what happened,” she says. “Did you expect it?”

He toys with a compass, the point pressed into a finger, easing into standing beside her, watching her flick through his work. “I anticipated some of the events. But I did not know the specifics.”

“Did you think you were going to die?”

“Now, I will. She gave me a reprieve of a handful of decades. What is that to four millenia?” A dot of blood wells from where he presses to hard with the sharp point. He stares at it for a moment before bringing to his lips to suck clean; the compass he discards on the desk beside where she rested her hand. 

“Why did you come to Dunwall?”

“It is the beating heart of the Empire. I wanted to see everything from up close.”

He still speaks in the same way, though now their conversations feel less one-sided. He looks at her like he always did, though it’s more unnerving now. Now, it feels more like being stared at.

“Your majesty,” he says, and she corrects him almost instantly. “Emily.”

He smirks, and repeats after her. Emily grabs his wrist to hold him still and kisses him. It is like enough to other kisses but for the anticipation she feels, the anxiety in her stomach hot and sharp like going into a fight where she’s outclassed.

She pulls away.

The Outsider never blushed. His skin was always pale, near transparent, no evidence of blood below the surface. There is some color in his cheeks, a flush along his neck, and his lips were wet.

“Again,” he says, and she obliges. They are of a height, which makes it easier. He takes her hand, her left, his thumb rubbing over where his Mark had once been, and she lets go of his wrist to instead drape her arm over his shoulders. He feels so real, so solid, and with that came all the little offenses of humanity; the faint fishy smell in the room from the Wrenhaven, the scratchiness of his scholar’s robe.

He pulls away, and she stares again in amazement at the color in his cheeks, the fact that she could hear him breathing. Her image of him is shredded, solemnity built over a decade and a half flaking away. 

He steps back, and Emily lets him go. But she is truly surprised when he hitches the legs of his trousers higher and goes to his knees, shrugging the robe off his shoulders. She rests her hands on the desk behind her. She understands at once when he reaches for the button of _her_ trousers, but his hands hang limply in the air. Emily does not have room for embarrassment or even reflection before she finishes his work, undoing them and sliding them along with her underwear down to her knees, lifting herself onto the desk, her bottom on bare but worn-soft wood.

Enough assignations with Wyman had made her inventive but ultimately practical regarding finding the best possible positions, but it left him briefly speechless.

Then, he shuffles forward on his knees, laying a hand on her thigh. She parts them to allow him between.

Overhead, the dusty models of the heavens spin lazily. He does not say ‘I have not done this before’, because it is obvious in the little frown. But then he speaks, saying, “The mechanics are not unknown to me.”

Emily asks slowly, “Would you like me to show you?”

He shakes his head.

“No,” he says, “I have seen you in bed.”

Sardonically, she wonders if he means _alone_ or _with others_ , and supposes the answer is yes, his voyeuristic tendencies far reaching. Technical knowledge is less applicable than practical, and she thinks he has too much of the former and too little of the latter.

But that’s a problem she’s well equipped to solve. 

With her trousers bunched around her ankles, he puts his mouth on her. His tongue slides against her clit in a way that soon has her squirming. He doesn’t even glance up at her, too focused on his work. His face provides enough to hold her attention in how his cheeks hollow when he opens his mouth wider to lick longer stripes against her, his tongue dipping inside her only briefly before he replaces it with his fingers. These he works in counterpoint to his mouth; she catches the letters he traces with his tongue and curses his humor, N-T-O-N-F-L-E-S, before he can finish the rest. It is better than the far more route alphabet, for by the time he reaches A-V-A-I she has her fingers between her teeth to choke back the laughter mixed with wet, gasping inhales as she comes.

He stumbles forward while she’s still rolling through the aftershocks, fumbling his trousers open and penetrating her in one stuttering thrust. Emily tightens her hold on the edge of the desk, but she is still jarred with each thrust. He manages half a dozen strokes before he is bent over, panting against her neck, and then he comes, utterly silent.

She doesn’t begrudge him that. She can’t even call it selfishness. A disappointing lack of stamina, maybe, but that could be improved through practice, if he cared to try. 

He lifts his head, shaky, his hands held out to brace himself on the desk if he should stumble.

“Fucking in response to strong emotion,” he says. “Lust. How human.”

Emily is taking a handkerchief and a small mirror from her pocket while he speaks; she wipes herself clean and checks her hair in the mirror. The desk was not dusty, there will be no tells for gossiping eyes in the marks left behind. 

“You are,” she points out, and swipes under her lip with a nail to clean the lines of her lipstick, most of it lost.

“Yes,” he says. “I am.”

She redoes her trousers, tucks her shirt back in. “And what will you do now? Flee? Disappear?”

He frowns. “No. My work is here.”

“Your work.”

“My studies,” he clarifies. “I am… curious to see if the laws of nature hold. If what I remember is enough.”

She looks up at the models above them. “You could topple the Academy with your knowledge. Out-invent Sokolov. Or Jindosh.”

He steps back and leans against a desk. “I do not remember everything. I am no longer…”

“Omnipotent?” she suggests.

He smiles. “Yes. And I am grown tired of infamy.”

“So, what will you do?”

His grin is wide. “I do not know.”

“Continue to study here?” she presses. “How are you affording tuition anyway.”

He shrugs. “I do not remember everything, but I only had need of the memory of one dead man’s forgotten cache of gold.”

That is clever. She approves. She knows he has probably given half of it away. 

“Being my lover would lead to a certain level of fame. People would want favors from you."

His smile is all sharp teeth. “I have no intention of associating with the nobility.”

And the academics would care only in that it made the Empress more likely to be a generous patron. 

“I don’t blame you,” Emily says, and stands. She bends to check the knife holstered in her boot out of habit more than anything, making sure it was secure. 

“I did not object,” he points out, “to the proposition. Or is it an arrangement?”

“It could be,” Emily says. 

“I think I would like that,” he said, sounding somewhat distant, as if he was actually considering it in an abstract sense, weighing his feelings against possible futures. Seeing she was reassembled for good company, he offered her his arm. She took it, keeping her touch light. It was entirely symbolic, after all.

“Then,” she said, and nodded to the door. “Let’s begin.”


End file.
